Dersu Uzala DVD

The ten years that separate Red Beard (1965) – the last film Kurosawa ever made with Toshiro Mifune – from Dersu Uzala (1975) probably qualify as the worst of Akira Kurosawa's life. He spent five years labouring over Dodesukaden, his first colour film, an odd Japanese echo of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, only for the film to receive a critical and commercial drubbing in his native Japan. Amid rumours of mental ill-health, he undertook production duties on the Japanese leg of Tora! Tora! Tora! only to be sacked and replaced by Kinji Fukasaku (a large number of aerial shots in the finished film come from an uncredited Kurosawa). No wonder then that the 70s began with Kurosawa attempting to take his life. What is perhaps surprising is just how life-affirming Dersu Uzala, the first film he managed to secure funding for, actually ended up.

Based on a 1923 memoir written by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev and concerning a series of mapping expeditions around the Sikhote-Alin region of Siberia in the company of an old Nanai (Russian/Asian) hunter (the eponymous Dersu Uzala, a beautiful, craggy-faced performance from Maxim Munzuk), Dersu Uzala is generally passed over these days as lesser Kurosawa, despite the fact that the film snagged the Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival and the 1975 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

It's certainly worthy of re-evaluation, though. The vast Siberian wilderness provides Kurosawa with a canvas and a scope that arguably breed much of the widescreen action of Kagemusha and Ran. Whether you take the trees glowing red from the embers of a fire, the ethereal blue smoke rising as Dersu points out his family's burial site or the long static shot of Dersu and Arsenyev as they look at the horizon, juxtaposed between the rising moon and the setting sun, there is much in Dersu Uzala that will take your breath away.

What's more, in these days of climate change and carbon offsetting, Dersu Uzala's message, that man should really start to look long and hard at what he is doing to the world, takes on a resonance that wouldn't have existed thirty years ago and lends Kurosawa a strangely prophetic eye.

Peter Wild on 1st February 2007
Author of 99 reviews